The Effect of Gold Electroforming Procedure on Gold-silver-palladium Alloy

Statement of problem. The effect of gold electroforming on gold alloy was not studied. Purpose. This in vitro study investigate the effect of gold electroforming on gold-silver-palladium alloy. Material and methods. Three pieces of gold strips had undergone the electroforming procedures on one side and then half of the side again electroformed. The set mode for this study was program 1 (200 μm). And the processing time was 15min (1/20 time to form 200μm coping). The confocal laser scanning microscope (PASCAL 5, Carl Zeiss, Bernried, Germany) was used to measure the thickness of the pure gold layer electroformed on the gold strips. Half of the gold strip was coated two times with electroformed gold, and the other half one time. The data from the cone focal laser system was processed to get the vertical profile of the strips and the difference of the vertical height between the double coated and single coated layer was regarded as the thickness of the gold coating. The layer thickness value to built 3D image of the cone-focal laser was set 0.5 μm. Next to the measurement of the thickness of the coating, the Vicker’s hardness test was done. It was performed on the double coated surface, single coated surface and non-coated surface (back side) three times each. Results. The mean thickness value gained from gold electroforming technique was measured to be 22 μm for sample 1, 23 μm for sample 2, 21 μm for sample 3. In the same condition of time, power and the amount of electrolyte, the data showed no difference between samples. According to the results of variance analysis, the differences among the variations in number of coating were statistically insignificant (p>0.05), meaning that the two times of gold electroforming coating did not change the hardness of gold-silver-palladium alloy. Conclusion. The test of thickness of gold coating proved the coherency of the gold electroforming procedure, in other words, when the power, the exposed surface area, processing time and the amount of electrolytes were set same, the same thickness of gold would be coated on. The hardness test showed that the electroformed gold coating did not change the hardness of the gold-silver-palladium alloy when it is coated not more than 45 μm.